Autobahn 2014 - or How I Learned Not to Trust 32-Year-Old Balls

Well, another race weekend is in the books.

We at Sir Jackie Stewart's Coin Purse Racing would like to congratulate everyone on a fantastic weekend and thank those of you who played a part in our weekend in particular.

Leading up to the race, we concentrated on exterior illumination and theme enhancements.  The only mechanical improvements we made to the car were to replace a slop-inducing tie rod and a slop-inducing steering rack bushing.  That took out about 2/3 of the slop.  We also replaced most ignition or fuel components with either spares from our parts car or Rock Auto purchases.  That was done in an effort to eliminate a strange sputtering/weak power condition that afflicted the car two weeks prior to the race.

At our last race - Road America - we were of course underpowered.  And we could hardly use 2nd gear due to our soft suspension allowing us to lift the inside front tire when exiting the corner.  We had hoped the tighter confines of Autobahn Country Club might narrow the performance gap to the competition somewhat.  We hoped we'd see more "go-kart" like handling with shorter straights to keep us closer in lap time to the class B cars.

We were wrong.  Nautical-style body roll coupled with tired old bushings, springs and struts led to handling that was crappy at best, spooky at worst.  The word we agreed best described the car's handling: "billowy".  Imagine the handling of a luxury yacht paired with 70 hp.  Not exactly a recipe for racing success.  In addition, we experienced fuel starvation during hard, aggressive, long right hand turns (if 2 out of the 3 were present, we paid for it when we got back on the gas and the motor stumbled for a half second while it tried to find some fuel.)  Most likely this was a product of early 80's carburetors paired with crappy suspension.

Our only real incident during practice was an inability to get the engine running smoothly after our first practice session on the full course.  It turned out to be a vacuum cap that had popped off the vacuum block sometime prior to the car coming back into the paddock.  We replaced it, zip tied it and the car returned to its sewing machine-like power output.

Our fourth driver arrived Friday around midnight, carrying our transponder and cool suit cooler.  So we spent Saturday morning getting those ready.  We finished up about 20 minutes before green flag.

The race was a reasonably good one for us.  We were slow, but consistent.  We worked our way up the standings from the 60's to the 50's overall and from 4th in class C to 2nd in class C.  Only two laps behind the Schnitzelwagen after 100 laps on track.  Then: disaster.  For the second time that day, a car nearly door-banged us in the exit of turn 6, causing the driver to get spooked and move over onto the rumble strips.  It happened during the first stint to me and it happened to driver #3 in the exact same place.  The driver continued down the track through 7 and into 8.  When turning the wheel to the right, the car suddenly dropped on the left side and you could hear the tire squealing across the pavement before driver 3 brought it to rest in the grass to the left.  (Then sat nervously as cars went sailing by just a few feet away.)

The resulting damage: 1 broken ball joint and 1 chewed up Falken Azeni.

The offending ball joint came out looking like a civil war era musket ball, devoid of any lubrication.

(Cameo appearance by cpchampion.)

Our crew thrashed to remove the old Detroit lower control arm, using a chisel and 2 lb. sledge to help back out the old bolt.  We then found a suitable replacement bolt from The Wonderment Consortium's giant bag o' old bolts and had our new lower control arm installed in about 45 minutes.  That's about 18 laps if you're in a Ford EXP.

The car went back out for a couple laps, during which tSoG tried to shake down the handling and see if there were any other problems.  Except he forgot to watch out for turn 5 and ended up in the grass, earning the team's only black flag of the weekend.  He returned to the track and shook it down a bit more, then brought it back for the mechanics to check it over due to some lingering creaks and bumps.  The crew found nothing of significance, so we were back in the race.

We made it through the course changeover and did our next driver change putting doctawife back into the car.  She ran nearly her full stint, then returned on the hook devoid of electrical power.  We traced the problem to the battery terminal where the battery wire had slipped out of its crimp.  12 minutes later we were back on track with cpchampion again.  He was fortunate to have the dusk stint, as he hadn't driven any laps on the full course during practice.  He was unfortunate to spend 22 minutes doing 22 mph behind the parade of cars during a full course caution as the officials flagged all the hoopties without proper head- or tail-lights.  Without the parade, caution laps were a lot of fun for us as we could just barely keep up by flogging the EXP for all it was worth.

I went out for the final stint and really had a blast.  Most likely due to the attrition, I was finally able to flog the car for more than a corner or two before getting caught by another freight train of faster cars.  That, paired with other cars having poor forward visibility or nervous drivers, I was finally able to pass a couple of cars.  Thanks, #666, #220 and #29!

We finished up the race in 53rd overall, 4th in Class C.  During awards, Jay explained that whoever had come out ahead between the Fiat X1/9 and the EXP would have won IOE.  We ended up 6 laps behind the Fiat.  I was admittedly heartbroken by the news.  But I am trying to remember that we had a blast most of the weekend, trophy or no trophy.  Coming this close I'm torn between continuing to push for an IOE or starting to improve the car and improve our fun factor.

We left the track with a running, driving race car.  So at this point, we're considering freshening shocks and springs, upgrading to non-original spec springs, swapping in a 5 speed...  Not sure what we'll end up doing.  Just going to take a break and relax for a couple weeks.

Thanks again to everyone who helped make this weekend possible.

-Scott